


Mornings are the hardest

by telekinesiskid



Series: Mornings are the hardest [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, OT3, The fear of hurting the ones you love, night horrors, two boyfriends hunt for their missing third boyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 21:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6255979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His hands are still black with the horror’s blood; he presses his face into his clutched arms instead. The first sob that’s wrung out of him is always the worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mornings are the hardest

**Author's Note:**

> I'm super proud - this is the first thing in a VERY LONG TIME that is 3rd POV. super super chuffed over here B)
> 
> Huge thanks to [kiiouex](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) for beta'ing!!!! She's a champ. Go check out all her amazing trc stories - she does every couple imaginable lmao

Adam wishes that Gansey had noticed Ronan’s absence before he did. He knows he’s more than a little obligated to wake Gansey, but he doesn’t want to; he doesn’t want to do this all over again, keep chasing after someone who wants to be forgotten, and put himself through another harrowing experience that shaves ten years off his life. For just one shameless moment he closes his eyes and wishes that he could fall asleep again, but the very idea that he could is about as surreal and ludicrous as a dream. And he knows just as well as any of them that wishing never got them anywhere.

His eyes peel back open. Instead of Ronan, he stares at the wall, his muscles tense but unmoving, breathing even but not for much longer. Winter mists at the factory windows; he catches spurts of drizzle on darker backdrops, wind batters at the solitary tree down the road, and cold streetlight pours in, washing over Adam like an upturned bucket of water. He knows he should move. He’s never as good with these things as Gansey is. He needs Gansey. _Ronan_ needs Gansey.

 _Ronan could be dead,_ his mind whispers, and the snag of dread in his gut finally thaws him.

Adam finds Gansey on the far side of the mattress, back turned to him. He reaches out to put a hand on his shoulder and shake; “Gansey,” he croaks, voice tight. He tries and fails to swallow the lump in his throat and shakes a little harder. “Gansey.”

The king stirs. He shifts just enough to squint at Adam over his shoulder. His bleary eyes take in just enough of Adam’s raw expression to register that something is wrong and then he sits bolt upright, eyes wide and fresh with alarm. “What—what is it?” he demands, one hand scrambling for his wire-frame glasses by his pillow, his eyes frantically darting between every dark crevice where life could conceivably hide. He’s already throwing the covers off his legs when he blurts, “Where’s Ronan?”

“I don’t know,” Adam says, barely a whisper, and he watches with a wretched kind of guilt churning in his stomach as Gansey doesn’t even hesitate; he jams his feet into some rumpled trousers and shoves his arms into a coat and thinks _keys_ before _shoes._ He pauses at the door – the way he catches his step makes it look like an afterthought – and asks Adam, already breathless, “Are you coming?”

Adam abandons the mattress and swoops for some sandals as he follows Gansey out. _Of course,_ he thinks, so scared out of his wits that he almost misses a stair and falls on Gansey. His mind involuntarily floods with endless possibilities, each one more hair-raising than the last. _Of course, of course, of course._

They start with all of Ronan’s usual haunts. It’s only seven on a frosty Wednesday morning, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that Ronan decided to hit up a pub or a bottle store, or is still thereabouts from the night before. It’s just another one of the many things they don’t talk about; Ronan’s drinking has gone from bad to worse, and hard liquor has become the new and unmistakable flavour of _Lynch_ that both Adam and Gansey have miserably grown accustomed to. Adam tastes it – bitter and sterile and numbing – in his mouth every time they kiss, and it almost blots out everything else. Gansey is mint leaves, musty leather-bound books, fresh clothes as crisp and warm as toast; Ronan is booze and sweat and smoke and, very occasionally, blood. 

Gansey peers out the driver’s side and Adam stares out the passenger’s as the Pig grunts down the drowsy streets, streetlamps burning orange against the deep blues and purples of still-closed establishments. Adam continues to hold Gansey’s phone to his good ear, on the line only to an endless stream of dull rings. When the rings run out, he redials the number, just so that he can say he did. He knows that Ronan won’t pick up, even if he could.

They stop by St Agnes. The streets in the area are starting to pick up with traffic; Gansey finds himself stuck in a no-parking zone, so Adam dashes inside himself. He shoves open the front doors and flies past countless pews, imagining a body emptied of its blood and its damned soul, hoping instead for a curled up and penitent boy. He runs up to the balcony and checks the pews behind the dusty organ, and he walks along the thin corridor of flats where he once used to reside, for good measure.

He leaves the church, empty-handed, and he meets Gansey’s eye before he’s even made it back to the car. All he can offer him is a shake of his head.

Gansey doesn’t try very hard to hide the sudden drop in his stomach. He swallows with too much effort. “The Barns, then,” he says stiffly, and the Pig snarls onwards.

They know immediately when they pull into the drive that he’s there. His charcoal BMW sits lazy and askew, concealed partially under a line of trees, impossibly green and fruitful for this time of year.

The property is large but they don’t have the luxury of time; Gansey tells Adam to check the main house while he’ll take the various sheds and huts that dot the periwinkle landscape. Adam remembers to blurt, “Be careful,” before Gansey sets off, but he frets for a moment that he didn’t make it clear what he should be careful of. Hornets, night horrors – maybe it’s all the same to Gansey where Ronan’s safety is concerned. He doesn’t care.

Adam walks to the front door. He tries it, heart already heavy with the inevitability that it will be locked, but the handle gives and the door falls open. Inside, the house is cold and dark with shadows. It’s funny, Adam thinks, how unloved and empty a place can look without light. He’s seen it before, in hazy summer afternoons, when crickets whirred by his ear and birds chirped from the open windows and it was impossible to escape the sun’s warmth, but now everything feels barren, lifeless. Sinister.

His ear pricks at a noise from the kitchen, but he can’t determine what it sounded like, or even if it came from intentional movement. He walks further into the house, cautious but ready. His hands are out to brush along the walls, running over framed family portraits and Christs on crosses and calendars that haven’t turned over in years. _How this place must hurt you, Ronan._

There’s another noise, like a wounded moan; and the back of Adam’s neck erupts with pinpricks.

Another few noises – a meaty squelch, a whimper, a _tck tck tck_ – and Adam silently thuds back onto the wall, pressed hard into it. His heart pounds too loud and too hard to think, to hear over; he closes his eyes and swallows and tries to beat back the stuttered memories of Ronan’s bodies, riddled with clean slashes, flesh shredded and torn open, blood a dark thick mass that leaks out in pulses, eyes wide and wet and _scared,_ faraway, seeing only pain, pleas to die coming out in pitiful croaks—

Adam doubles over and dry-retches, breath ragged and gasping and audible.

Ronan whines just as there’s a skitter, and Adam’s been in the dark long enough to see a new shadow press in from the end of the hallway.

He whirls around, scrambles blindly for the front door, hears footsteps thump up behind him—

There’s a shot like gunfire, close and personal, and his ear rings. Adam knows rationally that it’s just the reverberation, that the shot took place a little ways _behind_ him, but he still trembles like the bullet had been fired right into his ear.

The night horror keens harshly but after another shot, it crumples to the floor. The gun is tossed and a figure like Ronan – _our Ronan or a different one? –_ steps in to cut its throat, savage yet clumsy, and Adam hears the creature’s final breath bubble out of its beak.

Adam takes slow steps forward until he comes into the little open family room, lit up only with the violet pre-sunrise of the sky. Ronan’s hands are coated, slick with black, darker than any shadow in the house. There’s a smell, almost like diesel, but with a raw, organic tinge to it that he can immediately, unfalteringly place: blood. He doesn’t know if it’s purely the creature’s or if it’s Ronan’s too. The other Ronan’s.

Adam opens his mouth to speak but he doesn’t know what to say. Ronan speaks for him; “You shouldn’t have come here,” he mutters, incensed. “It’s too dangerous.”

_You mean you’re too dangerous?_

Both of them hear Gansey calling before he’s even made it into the house. The front door smacks open and Gansey rounds into the room, frantic eyes drinking in both Adam’s and Ronan’s expression, carefully attuned by now to hints of fear and pain. “Are you alright?” he asks no boy in particular. “I heard gunfire, I heard—oh my god.” He stumbles back and rear-ends a table as his eyes find the unnaturally black mass on the floor. He can’t swallow without gasping; the pre-morning light glints off the sweat on his brow. “Another one of those monsters…”

“Go home,” Ronan says.

Gansey’s head snaps to him. He balks for a moment before he can gather enough breath to respond. “We’ll help you get rid of this thing—”

“I said _go home,_ ” he shouts. His voice booms; it startles the both of them, but Adam doesn’t miss the crack on the last word, like he’s seconds from breaking. He watches on, as miserable as Gansey, as Ronan wipes his arm across his eyes. The words come out in a warbled rush, like he’s made the mistake of unleashing them and now they’re beyond his control. “I can’t do it anymore, alright, I just _can’t_ be in Monmouth anymore, not if it means I’ll bring out another fucking affront to God or – _fuck.”_

His hands are still black with the horror’s blood; he presses his face into his clutched arms instead. The first sob that’s wrung out of him is always the worst.

Gansey doesn’t care about the blood, just as he doesn’t care about any of it; he walks toward Ronan with nothing more than open arms. And Ronan can never just let it happen; he fights Gansey, he pushes and shoves and grapples with him, until he finally breaks down and the first cry cuts out of him like a fresh wound, deep and fatal. He burrows his forehead into Gansey’s neck and sticks inky handprints all up the back of his coat, and he spits woefully, _“Stupid, you fuckin’ idiot,”_ at him, or himself – Adam’s doesn’t know.

Adam steps over the feathered black mound of a corpse to reach them. By now the carpet is stained with its blood, soaking into their feet, but they don’t seem to care so tells himself that he shouldn’t care either; Ronan’s okay – in the physical sense – and that’s all that matters. He ropes his arms around the two of them and presses his head into someone’s shoulder. Arms curl around him too – gently around his back, fisting in his hair – and he feels how close they are, how warm, how real, how _important_. His throat aches with the sudden press of tears.

Just this once, he allows it.

**Author's Note:**

> I may potentially continue this??? and write more about the other two's problems? but we'll see!
> 
> Also I have a [tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/) in case anyone wants to harass me lol


End file.
